by J. Thorn
At least the screens will already be down when spring arrives. That’s one less thing she’ll have to bitch about.
Drew’s body folded in on itself as exhaustion dulled the rest of his senses. Before the bedside clock read seven, Drew slept.
***
“The fucker let me go years ‘fore I heard his voice again. Some of my buddies were real messed up from what they’d seen. The soldiers coming back from ‘Nam called it post-traumatic stress disorder. We called it casualties of war. Must’ve been four, five years since the war ended. We managed to stop the Nazis and kill Hitler. I know what you’re thinking, and no, he didn’t off himself. That was spun to keep us looking like the good guys. We shot that fucker dead. I seen the proof.
“Anyway, I thought I had put most of the war behind me. Got a job at the mill and was bringing home enough coin to get the family going. Me and the wife had a few little ones running around and bought into a new housing plan. They built the two-bedroom places on the ridge above the mills. You had to drive now, instead of walking. Gave a man like me the feeling that I was somehow removed from the dirty, hot, deadly blast furnace that I stood next to every day. Sure, the smoke and smog rolled up to the ridge with the winds. Dropped so much shit on us that she couldn’t hang clothes out to dry. We had an above-ground pool installed, and I had to sweep that fucker daily or the bottom would be covered with the black filth that US Steel blasted out the chimneys.
“Must’ve been ’49 or ’50 when I spoke to Gaki again. I had hosted a poker game with the boys and things got a bit rowdy. A few jokers from the Navy joined us. If you sit at a card table and see an anchor tattooed on a forearm, get the hell out of there. Those boys spend weeks, months, floating in the middle of the godforsaken ocean. They get damned good at poker.
“The game ended and I grabbed a fistful of poker chips and three fingers of Jack before the table cleared and everyone left. I think it was midsummer. Shit was hot, heavy. I wonder if Gaki found me that night ‘cause he felt at home, like he was back prowling the jungles looking for shit to eat.”
Drew turned and sweat broke out on his forehead. He felt the pace of the dream quickening and, like before, was powerless to stop it or to wake up.
“I heard the moaning and thought it had woken me up, but it hadn’t. It was happening in my dream. I know that now, but didn’t realize it back then. I was lying on my back with the wife in her twin bed, our bedside table between us. Man had to get damn creative to make babies in those days, what with separate beds and all. I looked up towards the doorway and saw a shadow pass by. It wasn’t one of those tricks your mind plays on you in the middle of the night. Wasn’t one of those noises that convince you a monster is prowling the house. No, this was real.
“I saw it come back the other way and knew Gaki wanted to talk, but for some reason, he wanted to do it on his terms. Figuring I had no reason to invite the eater of shit into the room where the mother of my children slept, I got up. I pulled a robe around my waist and hitched my boxers up before walking out of the bedroom. I caught glimpses of the shadow as it turned the corner of the landing towards the main floor. I got to the bottom of the steps. The house shook and the floorboards creaked like there was a whole bunch of folks walking around in there.
“‘Sit.’
“That one word tasted like spoiled, sour milk in my mouth. Hearing it made my stomach turn and I gagged as if trying to expel the sound of his voice from my body. I did as he commanded and sat in a wooden rocking chair that belonged to my granddaddy. The arms of the chair had blond streaks where the stain had been worn away by him. He loved that rocker.
“‘Why are you back?’ I asked.
“Gaki said nothing. I could not see him yet, but I sensed him in the room. He poisoned the air with a foul stench that knocked me back, even in a dream.
“‘The greed. Now it’s yours. Now you Gaki.’
“‘No. No fucking way. I left the war, and you, and all of that horrific shit on a beach in the Pacific. I’m done.’
“‘Yours, yours.’
“‘This is just a dream,’ I said. Gaki’s words rocked me. I struggled to think, to speak.
“‘It will consume you. No release.’
“‘Why are you back?’ I asked again, knowing I would never get an explanation.
“He pointed to the gold coin hanging around my neck.
“‘Now you are eater of shit.’
“That was the last line that sonovabitch ever said to me. Can you believe that? I’m now ‘eater of shit.’ What did that mean?
“As the months and years moved on, I started to understand Gaki. The greed came in waves, pounding the shores of my sanity into submission.”
Chapter 8
He would have to drink coffee without Sage. Ravna scanned the counter and cramped kitchen behind it before accepting the idea that his goth princess was not on shift today. His mind floated away, imagining her in nothing but black panties, wrapped between white, satin sheets in a room full of candles.
“Sign?” The fellow behind the counter snapped Ravna back to reality. He held the torn, curled paper spit out by the credit-card-authorization device along with a pen. A tether held the end of the pen to the countertop with a braided, hemp string. Ravna looked into the face of disenfranchised youth. A black teardrop tattoo sat underneath the boy’s right eye while coal-black bangs swung down over the left. The plugs in his lobes stretched the opening to the size of a quarter, and his mascara ran a bit at the corners. The Bullet for My Valentine shirt clung to the boy’s thin frame, and a white apron covered his hips.
“Sorry. Lost my train of thought.”
The boy waited, unmoved. Ravna signed the slip and carried the tray to his favorite table, the one in the corner that looked out to the main thoroughfare. Pedestrians shuffled past the window, blowing plumes of breath into the frigid air.
He set the laptop on the table and sighed. Ravna looked up at the faux-coffee-bag banners strung from the pipes in the ceiling, contemplating what he might do when the log-on screen appeared. There was the He Knows You’re Dead review with a Friday deadline, and the interview spread with Roc Salta, a hot, new horror-flick director that Ravna had chased for months before Salta’s agent granted his interview request. As his fingers caressed the keyboard with the familiar pattern of his username, Ravna knew both of those pieces would have to wait. He smelled Gaki in this town, and that could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
The bell on the glass double doors jingled. Ravna looked up in time to see Sage’s braided hair. She wore pink sweats and a fluffy, Eskimo winter coat, which immediately tarnished his vampire-chick fantasy. She walked to the counter where Bullet for My Valentine boy handed her an envelope.
Payday, thought Ravna, turning his attention back to his research.
Ravna logged on to the laptop and shuffled through his messenger bag until he found the book. The ancient text felt heavy in his hands, an obligation more cumbersome than its physical weight. He placed it on the table.
The web browser appeared and Ravna went directly to the Channel 7 website. He scanned the headlines for the most recent one on the Crooked Tail River murder. With a click of the mouse, the story filled the screen. An image accompanying the story stole Ravna’s attention. On the screen appeared a vivacious woman enjoying a drink. Her dark hair looked youthful but on the cusp of turning lighter, toward the beginnings of gray. She smiled at the camera with a sensuality far deeper than the shallow supermodels in glossy magazines. The woman was sexy because of what she hid, not what she revealed.
Victim Vivian Cabmel, read the caption underneath.
Ravna skimmed the article, which could have been written about the murder of any attractive, single woman. It was filled with the usual comments from neighbors, acquaintances, and detectives.
A new e-mail envelope appeared in the bottom, right corner of the screen, which drew Ravna’s attention from the story. He opened it and immediately began a reply, forcing the murder of Viv
ian Cabmel a notch down on his priority list.
***
Although he could not see the daylight struggling to break through the dying night, he felt it. The dream kept his mind occupied while his body tossed and turned in the bed. The messenger would not release him until it was time.
“Televisions, cars, even women. Mostly electronics. I could not help myself when it came to electronics. I paid thirteen hundred dollars for one of the first VCRs that hit the market. Mighta been Betamax. Ain’t that the shit? It never ended with the first or even the best. I had to have it all. If TI came out with a new calculator, I bought the whole line. Shit, I had no more use for a calculator than a dildo, but I couldn’t stop myself.
“It didn’t happen all at once. I remember the wife asking me why the account was overdrawn. We had two or three checks come back. In those days, bouncing a check was like wearing a scarlet letter. Everyone in town knew you were a deadbeat or a cheat, even the priest and the nuns of the parish. You see, greed doesn’t swoop in like you hit the lottery. It creeps underneath your door and slowly steals your sanity until you’re consumed by it. It was so clear when I think about it now. The connection between Gaki, the greed, and what he said to me was crystal. I think I didn’t want to believe it. I can sense you already don’t. You’re trying to convince yourself that I’m telling you this story because it’s entertaining or because it’s some kind of wicked family genealogy. Well, it’s all of that, too, I guess.
“But I’m getting ahead of myself. As I was saying, the greed had me by the balls. It’s one thing if you’re lusting after VCRs and televisions, but it’s another if you’re chasing other men’s wives. I fucked my way through the entire neighborhood. I dipped my pecker into every lonely housewife on the block, most of them more than once, and several let me put it anywhere I damn well pleased. Yeah, she knew. But what could she do about it? Men worked and brought home the paycheck, and the women tended house and kids. There wasn’t no other option. Wasn’t like she was going to head out on her own, find a job with nothing but an eighth-grade education and three runts tugging on her skirt. She knew and she had to deal with it. I had my greed and she had my greed. You share it all, good stuff and bad, in marriage.
“She confronted me on the cheating once. Once. After I let’er have her say, I knocked two teeth from her mouth and pushed her nose so crooked the doc had to fix it. Told ’em she fell down the stairs with a look that said he would too if he questioned it. Different times.
“Never had recurring dreams of a bayonet slicing through a man’s gut, or of arms blown off at the shoulder and lying in the dirt, or raping them gook women until they bled. I lived those things and they never came back to me like they did for other GIs. I was free and clear of those sins, like they was committed by someone else in some other time, like some bad Saturday matinee starring John Wayne and his cigarette. Nope, never had flashbacks or crazy nightmares about the war. My pain was much worse as my greed consumed my every living moment.
“As my body started breaking down and her mind starting going, the pull of the greed lessened. No, it didn’t lessen. My ability to slake its thirst did. After retirement, I couldn’t keep up with the newest electronics. Think I had one of the first cellular phones, but never went past that. No computers or laptops. Couldn’t get the women no more, neither. Right before I retired I managed to find enough in our savings to splurge on three call girls. That was some night, although my parts ain’t what they used to be and I spent most of the time watching them enjoy each other. Either way, it was money well spent and the last of the sexual urges I could satisfy with my old bones.
“I didn’t stop with the cars. Got a new one every other year, each one bigger and more loaded than the last. Had me a Caddy, Lincoln, a couple of Oldsmobiles. The cars they used to call tanks meant something. Not every skirt in town had an SUV. If you had power windows, you were somebody. Then again, I’m not sure how much it all mattered. Greed had me by the balls so tight that for the last few years of my life the car sat in the garage six days a week. Sundays I took it to church along with a sister and a sister-in-law. Greed had me collect gas money from them. How’s that, son? How’s that for being a dickheaded cheapskate?
“Your grandma had lost it by then. Her mind flew the coop long ago, and the family pretended there was still some essence of her left in that broken body. They’d say things like, ‘Nana seems better today. She called me by name.’ Guess when you can’t remember the names of your kids no more, getting one right out of sheer luck is a ‘good day.’ Point is, I was free of her scrutiny, her fucking judgment. She knew better than to confront me on my consumption, so she bundled it up in neat little packages, dispensing it at times that would make it impossible for me to smack her in the mouth. By the end, she lost that too. I got tired of cleaning her shit off the walls, forcing her to change her fucking underwear, or helping her get in the bathtub. Ain’t nothing loving about a loss of dignity.
“I thought on many a night about the handgun I kept under the floorboards in the bedroom. Thought I could arrange it to be a suicide. Shit, I’ll bet I coulda put it in her hand and told her to do it and she would have. Your ma is the only thing that stopped me. That was my oasis, my one place of refuge from the curse Gaki laid on me. My only daughter was my light. I could see the pain in her eyes when she saw your grandmother, drool running down her face, passing the most violent gas you could possibly smell. Yep, your ma still loved her ma, and for that reason alone I couldn’t release my wife from the disease that ate away at her brain. Your mother had hope, and that would outrun the greed by just a bit.
“Of course, even hope dies. We were both in the home by then. It took me all of two weeks to realize what a shithole that place was. Didn’t matter that it was run by the church or that it got state funds. Nothing but skin, bones, and death walked those halls, and the assholes in the blue garbs knew it. They knew they would outlast every motherfucker in the joint, could punch ’em, kick ’em, starve ’em. Whatever. I think it was worse for me because my brain was still straight. Your grandma was long gone, lying in a grave that happened to be covered with a soiled sheet. I remember the time, towards the end, when your mother brought you and the other grandkids in to see us. She couldn’t even talk at that point, just stared at the ceiling waiting for death. But you guys stayed in her room a helluva lot longer than you did mine. I wasn’t bitter about it. I knew my days was numbered, too, but it sure told me what my greed had done. You showed her rotted brain more love than mine.
“One of the orderlies came in on a muggy, summer morning to tell me she was gone. Can you believe I couldn’t even get a wet eye? Over sixty years of marriage and all I felt was relief. Like I said, she wasn’t nothing but a shell by then. Guess I did my grieving long before that morning.”
Drew shook and his heartbeat quickened. His eyeballs popped back and forth, trying to fight their way through the night.
“We only got a short time left. I’m guessing by now you know where this is going, which is why your body is trying to wake you up. Self-preservation kicking in. I got so good at smelling that during the war that I could shoot a gook dead ‘fore my crosshairs ever found his slant-eyed face.
“Don’t know how it all works. Shit. I don’t know how none of it works. What I do know is that I came out of that jungle afflicted by something I didn’t have going in. Some soldiers left an arm, a leg, or their life in the sweltering jungles of the Pacific. I left my future. I got tagged by fucking Gaki and that bastard bided his time. He let me get back to the real world, make some money, get a slice of the American Dream. And then he called in the chips. Thing of it is, I don’t think I fulfilled my duty. Some of them Japs called it dharma. Heard ’em talking about it at one of the POW camps we set up on Okinawa. Don’t remember exactly what it means, but I know it came from the Hindus or the Buddhists or one of them dark-skinned monkeys. Means something like duty, or obligation. I used to call greed my dharma, like it was some special condition that I had
. I imagined going on the talk shows with my dharma.
“Gaki never came back, but his mark never left me. The greed manifests itself according to the individual. Gaki is the avatar, the representation of it. I think I saw him the way the Japs did, eating shit, never satiated. I saw him as that pathetic creature doomed to consume without hope of being content. I’m guessing that’s how you’re gonna see him, too.”
Drew shook. A moan slipped from the corner of his mouth.
“I know you felt him. Those nights, listening to the wind rattle the windows or the temperature tweaking the floorboards. That was Gaki. I know it. You know it. He’s coming for you, and you know what he wants. My greed ate me alive, but I think your vice is deeper, a red gash deep in the flesh that won’t stop bleeding no matter what you do.
“Now that I’m gone, I have a feeling that whatever being rules this plane will put me somewhere, with an emaciated body, tiny mouth, and the inability to satiate my lusts. I’m the new Gaki, but not your Gaki. You get your own, son. You get yer own.
“You’re about out of time with me. I did what I could, what I had to. You should know that I did like ya. Those times I took you golfing, we enjoyed ourselves. Getting a burger at the clubhouse and sneaking you a sip of my beer, that was good times. But it’s all about business now. Shit, you’ve known you’ve been infected for a while. All I’m doing is making it all official. A receding widow’s peak ain’t all you’re inheriting from me, Drew.